Transforming Depression and Anger

Transforming Depression and Anger

By Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw

February can be Depression month in northern countries like Canada, the time of year when winter, lack of physical activity and gray skies add to other conditions in people’s lives leaving a sense of meaninglessness and extreme tiredness. However, depression affects many people at any time of the year.

Depression has been treated a few ways. Roughly three-quarters of depression patients are treated with anti-depressant drugs like Paxil, which is the most widely prescribed in Canada. Others use a combination of drugs and therapy. Or therapy alone, which is aimed at helping to recognise the difference between feelings of disappointment and reality and teaching a more balanced view of their thinking.

Unfortunately about 80% of patients who respond positively to drugs, suffer remission within a year of quitting their medications. In contrast while similar numbers of patients benefit from therapy aimed at changing their negative views and responses to events in their lives, the benefits last long after the treatment ends, with only about 25% relapse.

Studies have found that the brain responds differently to these two approaches. Drug treatment worked in the limbic area of the brain while therapy created greater activity in the frontal cortex, or ‘mind’ centre of the brain, working from top down, teaching the patients not to ruminate forever of tiny setbacks, while drugs worked from the bottom up. The brain naturally attempts to heal itself and therapy enhances what the brain is doing to help itself.

US researchers published one of the largest studies ever undertaken on depression in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Patients responded about the same on either drugs or therapy alone but did better when the treatments were combined. For those with earlier childhood trauma, adding drugs to therapy added little or no benefit. Therapy worked more effectively.

Current research into the effects of meditation on Tibetan Buddhist monks also show that meditation stimulates the frontal cortex, resulting in a happier disposition and view of life.

One way of beginning to transform depression psychologically, is to approach it as repressed anger. The Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual leader, who made a rare appearance in Toronto in April for 11 days of teaching and a public talk, presents anger as two-fold. It has both a harmful aspect which can be identified and changed to create health and happiness. It also has a positive aspect as a ‘resolute stand against adversity’, when we combine it with patience. In this way, it becomes a passionate altruistic motivation to make a powerful difference in the world, small or large, and become less harmful to ourselves and others.

Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw, a former Tibetan Buddhist nun has successfully assisted those with depression by using transformative self-healing visualizations aimed at transforming the causes which underlay the depression and meditations to help change our attitudes to life.

Practical Meditation and Healing Visualisation CDs. click here

© Dekyi-Lee Oldershaw 2004